Thousands of students to rally for tuition roll back at public universities and colleges

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A crowd of up to 5,000 students plans to rally at the State Capitol Monday to demand more funding for higher education.

Student groups from the University of California, California State University and community colleges want tuition rolled back to pre-recession levels.

When California’s economy tanked in 2007, state revenues plummeted and lawmakers cut funding for higher education. University administrators responded by hiking the cost of tuition.

"Tuition has risen over the last decade by over 300 percent," says Darius Kemp, an organizer with the University of California Student Association. He says higher tuition costs make college too expensive for many California families.

"If we were looking at this from the price of bread, the price of milk, the price of gas, no one would sit around and say gas prices going up in a decade by 300 percent in a good thing," he says.

Kemp says students threw their support behind Proposition 30, the governor’s sales and income tax hike to boost funding for education. He says now that the revenue’s rolling in, those students want the state to share the wealth and keep its promise to make a college education in California affordable.